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Plausibility in Fantasy

To Alexei Mutovkin:
An open letter.

Thank you for
writing me. "Plausibility in Fantasy" is an excellent
topic, and one that fascinates me.

In answer to your
questions, I can of course speak only for myself; other writers
would give you very different answers.

While I am composing
I have no abstract ideas, purposes, or policies in mind, but am
intent only on following the story. But when I think about my story
from "outside" it, and when I read other people's
fantasies, I do think about such matters in a general way  an
intensely and immediately practical way, which often leads to
conscious imitation (something artists of course do constantly).

For example,
Tolkien's references to places, people, events (often of long ago)
that are not part of the immediate story: these give the reader a
conviction of the reality of the immediate scene  because it is
shown to be part of a much greater landscape, a long history, a whole
world of which it is only a glimpse. This is a strong technique for
making an imagined world plausible. This is a technique which one
can imitate, performing it in one’s own way.

Now, with Tolkien,
that history and geography already existed in his writings before The
Lord of the Rings. But in my fantasies, I have often mentioned
events or places which I didn't yet know anything about  for
example, some of the later exploits of Ged mentioned early in A
Wizard of Earthsea. These were, when I wrote them, merely words 
"empty" nouns. I knew that if my story took me to them, I
would find out who and what they were. And this indeed happened. . .

In the same way, I
drew the map of Earthsea at the very beginning, but I didn't know
anything about each island till I "went to" it.

Then there is
detail. The more realistic, exact, "factual" detail in a
fantasy story, the more sensually things and acts are imagined and
described, the more plausible the world will be. After all, it is a
world made entirely of words. Exact and vivid words make an exact
and vivid world.

The fantasy writer
must "believe in" the world she is creating, not in the
sense of confusing it in any way with the actual bodily world, but in
the sense of giving absolute credence to the work of the imagination
 dwelling in it while writing, and trusting it to reveal itself.

I believe that as
soon as wishful thinking or a conscious political or didactic purpose
intrude on that credence, they deform it and the story loses
plausibility. Wishful thinking gives us the feeble kind of fantasy
where everything is easy, and you never have to feed or water or look
after the horse you rode all day. An ideological purpose produces a
sermon, or satire (which is not fantasy, and has very different
standards of plausibility, since it is a mirror held up to actual
life).

The touchstone to
plausibility in imaginative fiction is probably coherence. Realistic
fiction can be, perhaps must be, incoherent in imitation of our
perceptions of reality. Fantasy, which creates a world, must be
strictly coherent to its own terms, or it loses all plausibility.
The rules that govern how things work in the imagined world cannot be
changed during the story.

This is probably one
of the reasons why fantasy is so acceptable to children, and even
when frightening may give the reader reassurance: it has rules. It
asserts a universe that, in some way, makes sense.

I hope these random
thoughts are useful. I enjoyed writing them down, and if you don't
mind, I may put them onto my web site!